Eating Out: Ramadan feasts abound, from Orléans to Hunt Club to Kanata to Barrhaven

Karahi Level
570 Kanata Ave. (in Kanata Centrum), 613-271-7474, karahipoint.com

Khokha Eatery
605 Longfields Dr., Unit 13, Barrhaven, 613-440-3999, khokhaeatery.com

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Royal Rooster Shawarma
3987 Riverside Dr., Unit 1 and 900 Watters Rd Unit 5, Orléans, royalroostershawarma.ca

Yemen Gate
2871 St. Joseph Boul., Orléans, 613-845-1715, yemengate.ca

The vacation that I’ll mark this weekend, as I succeed in every Spring, is Easter. Fully happy Easter to all who regain a excellent time it.

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Mute, in the leisure week, I’ve been very unfamiliar, in a first payment capacity, about Ramadan, the Muslim holy month that runs this year from March 10 to April 9.

For Ottawa’s roughly 100,000 Muslims — about 10 per cent of the metropolis’s inhabitants, according to the 2021 census —  Ramadan entails fasting each day from crack of morning time to sundown to foster like and non secular self-discipline. So, Muslim-owned restaurants, from Orléans to Hunt Club to Kanata to Barrhaven, can play an even bigger-than-bizarre position as nourishers of their visitors.

Some eateries lengthen their hours to duvet not simply Iftar, the post-sundown interval when the day’s fast is damaged, but furthermore a smaller meal referred to as Suhoor, which is ready to be eaten in the wee hours earlier than crack of morning time breaks. Some restaurants regain particular Ramadan menus, dishes buffets and to-inch meals.

For the interval of the leisure week, I sampled as remarkable Ramadan-connected fare as I would possibly well well, hunting for deliciousness plus a side portray of elevated inter-faith realizing.

My rounds, which amounted to a tour of Ottawa’s suburbs, took me to purveyors of Syrian, Yemeni and Pakistani fare.

First, four of us ordered from the Ramadan menu at the Syrian restaurant Royal Rooster Shawarma, where a signal greets customers with the assertion: “We’re on a mission to simply the form of us bring to mind shawarma.”

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It’s worthwhile to well well furthermore rethink what shawarma joints will even be after a focus on over with to Royal Rooster, which opened two years ago in the Riverside Power mall that entails T&T Supermarket.

Yes, Royal Rooster does regain a shawarma eatery’s bizarre commence kitchen that contains spit-roasting meat, and visitors succeed in portray at the money. Nonetheless the eatery’s great dining position holds 150 or so of us and it used to be lavishly decorated attributable to Ramadan. By sundown on the evening I visited, the restaurant used to be filling and its mood used to be celebratory, with a video of dancers and singers playing on a though-provoking mask.

We ordered a saj hen shawarma sandwich meal, which used to be brilliant. Lets regain ordered two diverse shawarma adaptations, namely “French” and “Italian,” which vary looking on the bread passe. Nonetheless I fancy unique dwelling-made saj bread, which puts store-sold pita bread to shame, and I will’t even imagine shunning it.

From the Ramadan menu, we had more broad dishes too, including chunks of delicate lamb on a mattress of nutty, smokey freekeh, a Middle Japanese total grain, and a few moist rotisserie hen, its skin crisped and darkened, on incandescent kabsa rice flecked with toasted almond slivers.

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Cheese-crammed sambosas and kibbeh had been savoury deep-fried starters. Glossy fattoush salad came with a courageous, citrus-y dressing. Shish barak had been peaceable, meat-crammed dumplings in a yogurt sauce. A prick of dwelling-made baklava used to be heavenly.

At Yemen Gate, which opened three months ago in Orléans and which has a smaller, older sister eatery on Monetary institution Avenue shut to Heron Facet toll road, we feasted meats layered on broad beds of yellowed, raisin-studded rice.

Right here, lamb haneeth starred a slab of tiring-roasted, effectively-seasoned meat whereas hen mandi’s poultry went its maintain diagram when it comes to its seasoning. A tomato-based mostly mostly sizzling sauce on the side added excitement and the ampleness of the servings guaranteed leftovers.

To birth, richly flavoured and fortified lamb broth used to be a straightforward, gorgeous starter. For meal-enders, we had three winners. Kunefe, a baked-to-portray salty-candy confection of shredded pastry, syrup and cheese, used to be heat, gooey and comforting. Yemen Gate’s “signature cocktail” used to be a thick concoction of mango, apple, banana, date paste and more. Harrisa used to be a delicate, peanut-y candy with cardamom notes.

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After these two Middle Japanese meals, we spun the globe and visited two Pakistani restaurants.

At Karahi Level, a seven-month-former, 170-seat eatery in Kanata Centrum, a deluxe buffet with almost 20 trays of meals is front and centre nightly all over Ramadan.

Once the solar region, we and ratings of others queued up to maintain our plates with highly seasoned and effectively-warmed objects.

Standouts incorporated: crisp, animated Lahori fried fish that compelled me to regain seconds and thirds; Tangy, candy, animated chaat papri, a chickpea-based mostly mostly indulgence; Juicy hen tikka; Chubby yakhni pulao rice; and assertively flavoured hen and pork karahi curries.

As simply and effectively-stocked as this buffet used to be, restaurant proprietor Muhammad Rashed Malik stated its objects would be twice as gorgeous if ordered a la carte after Ramadan. I made a mask to return to this Kanata foothold of a restaurant heed with 12 locations from Edmonton to Montreal, but largely in and around Toronto.

At remaining, I visited Khokha Eatery in Barrhaven, which I reviewed after it opened in 2021, to strive this puny but potent Pakistani restaurant’s clutch-dwelling Iftar containers.

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Owner-chef Zermina Siddiqi fills cake containers with a vary of safe to eat treats. Each field contains dahi bhalla (lentil fritters in spiced yogurt), chaat (chickpeas in an intoxicating tangy sauce), a vegetable pakora, dates, a mango juice field, deliciously cardamom-y rice pudding and both a crustless hen sandwich or a container of hen biryani. True $20, the Iftar field with biryani in explicit feels esteem a generous gift.

Filling as the Iftar containers had been, we supplemented them with Kokha’s lamb karahi, which used to be exceptionally simply.

Siddiqi told me she’s selling up to 35 Iftar containers each day, and he or she expects enterprise to swell as Ramadan continues. As many as a quarter of the containers are sold by non-Muslims, she stated.

After my remaining Ramadan-connected meal, I felt that I’d simply scratched the bottom of things. What about Ottawa’s Afghan, Persian and Lebanese restaurants? Fortunately, I will handle my culinary and cultural curiosity year-spherical.

phum@postmedia.com

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